Streamlining Operations for a Mobile Workforce by Automating File Transfers with Resilio Connect

Introduction

Companies are searching for the most efficient tools to help streamline their day-to day operations. IT teams distributing data to a remote workforce in the field are pressed with ensuring that each worker receives the latest updates on time. Buckeye Power Sales is one company that has mastered synchronizing mission critical data for their entire mobile workforce by partnering with Resilio.

Buckeye Power Sales delivers world-class power generators, outdoor power equipment, and service and care to individuals and companies throughout the Ohio and Indiana area. We’ll share with you how the IT team at Buckeye Power Sales automated their data distribution process to deliver valuable assets to their remote service technicians.

Challenge: Distributing quarterly updates to service techs in the field

As one of the leading power generator and outdoor power equipment suppliers, it was a top priority for Buckeye to keep their service and sales technicians up to date with the latest product literature and manuals from their vendors. Every quarter, Buckeye’s vendors released DVDs containing new content on the products that they sold and serviced. The IT team was tasked with the challenge of updating 8 office locations and over 160 sales technicians servicing machines out in the field .

“Before we had Connect, we were basically putting everything on flash drives, and would have to manually copy new 15G of data to every tech’s drive,” said Jason McCune, the IT Director at Buckeye. Distributing updates to their mobile workers and offices was extremely cumbersome. Once the company received quarterly DVDs from their vendors, one person was responsible for copying the new data to a main server that would later replicate the data onto servers at the 8 different office locations. Later, someone from each office had to rally up the service technicians to collect their flash drives, download the new literature, and later return the drives back to the technicians.

“If you count everybody involved, including the technicians & IT personnel with distributing the updates – unbudgeted hours were spent on updates versus revenue generating work,” said McCune. Incomplete updates and outdated documentation in the field lead to costly mistakes raising additional customer acquisition costs, lost sales, and reduced productivity.

They found cloud-based solutions to be unreliable. The equipment being served is located in remote locations where network connectivity is slow and intermittent. They also tried other data transferring tools, like Robocopy, in an attempt to automate their workflows using custom scripts. However, unlike Resilio Connect, these tools could not synchronize at block level for incremental file changes, and failed to efficiently recover from transfer failures.

​“To be honest I couldn’t really find a product that worked and that had the capabilities of Connect. I wasn’t able to find anything.”— Jason McCune , Director of Information Technology.

Solution: Wireless file transfers and remote endpoint management

Resilio Connect provided Buckeye a Central Management Console for administrators to seamlessly manage the data across all of the technicians’ devices without involving the techs in the data distribution process. Connect’s WAN optimization accelerated file transfer speeds which ensured that every device received the newest update on time. Connect’s Central Management Console enabled real-time system mirroring across all of the endpoints in their network, giving administrators greater visibility on managing the data on each node in their infrastructure.

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Impact

After Buckeye deployed Resilio Connect into their multi-office and mobile environment, Buckeye eliminated space for costly errors in their operations and streamlined their data distribution process. "Connect automated everything for us,” said McCune. By partnering with Resilio, Buckeye was able to successfully update their 160 plus remote workers with the most accurate and latest content from days to hours.

Moving Forward

Buckeye has expanded the use of Connect into other business operations because of its robust and versatile platform. They have automated their onboarding process for new technicians by utilizing Connect’s scripting capabilities - custom scripts push out commands for package installs onto every new field worker’s device. Resilio Connect is a scalable P2P file transfer solution that is transforming the way companies like Buckeye Power Sales move their data.

​“Our entire situation is tremendously better, great cost savings and our data is now delivered on time.”